Books

08/11/2018

The last couple of mornings I've walked around my neighborhood, my old neighborhood, the place I call home. In fact, it feels odd to call it my old neighborhood because I feel like I still live there, it is home in a way that the apartment complex really is not, even though I am perfectly comfortably settling in to my temporary location. Perhaps that is the key, that I know where I reside at the moment is temporary, and my heart is still in my home.

In fact, I assumed I would come back and walk around my neighborhood, although I did not really manage it most of the first week. There were reasons for this of course: the frustrations of establishing a new routine, the trials of unpacking and not finding things, the general principle that I dislike the idea of driving somewhere just to walk. However it has dawned on me that some principles are just pig-headedness, at least some of the time, and although the apartment complex is large, and is nicely planted with miles of sidewalks, it is a functional but completely uninspiring place to walk. I can listen to a book on tape, but then I miss the early morning conversation that I have with the world when I walk in my home neighborhood. Rather than a centering experience, walking around the apartment complex simply feels like exercise, another task to be completed, and although I need exercise, what I am interested in my morning walk is both movement and a spiritual centering, a centering that can occur in my neighborhood, but does not in the concrete world of parking lots and apartment buildings.

When I walk around my streets, and it is easy to walk anywhere from a couple of miles to several, I slow down, I listen to the early morning, I greet the plants and watch the birds, the rabbits, the occasional deer or fox. I am present, fully present in a way that I am not in the acres of concrete. I notice tiny things. They are not necessarily unusual things, but that is not the point. My soul calms and slows, even if I am puffing up a hill, and my awareness picks up thing that I would miss in the hustle and hurry of modern American life.

It is a mile away, as the crow flies, and yet I feel like it is a different world.

There is a large park near me as well, with a walking trail, and I've gone there a couple of times, but it is often more populated even in the early morning. I am more distracted when I walk there, and it all urban-nature, shaped by man, not at all like wild nature. The park is neither wild, nor lived in, and to me it seems more detached and impersonal, not wild, and yet not a habited place. Nature-nature and civilized nature feel different, just as I feel different at Lakeshore Park, than I do in my home neighborhood. The latter is home, a little more intentionally planted, but the difference is really not so great, and the comfort in the space is palpable, at least for me. We all seek and bring different perspectives to our activities, and there is a place for each, what is best for one does not have to best for all. Actually, it has been a while since I've gotten outside -- outside the city -- to a different kind of nature, and it is time to do so again, but I count that as different from the immediacy of my morning routine, my morning walk.

Tikka also enjoys going home. We went for a ride, went by the house, and when we pulled onto our street she perked up, started looking eagerly out the window, growing visibly more excited as we reached our driveway. She was eager to jump out of the car, eager to go inside, dancing around, displaying her inner puppy self, not her often calm 8 or 9 hear old self. She ran into the house and ran around, checking out the rooms; even empty, they were still hers. We went out the front door and she could hardly contain herself, eager to go piddle in her own front yard, eager to go for a walk around her block, to sniff the old familiar smells. It reminded me of the way I used to feel when when George and I returned from a trip and we crossed the Hudson River on the way to our house from the airport, as if the air changes, and you are suddenly home. It is a feeling I still experience, or I have experienced again since I moved into this house, just as I accept that in a certain way the condo on Maple Branch was never completely home to me, much as I tried to make it so.

This is not to say I am at all unhappy here. I am fairly content, I am becoming more and more settled. My neighbors are nice. I will have people over soon. But this remains a temporary landing pad; it is not my home. Today I will finish unpacking books in the living room, the books I chose to bring with me, the books I decided I would or should read, as if I could anticipate what I would want to read. But limitations and constraints are also good, and I am determined to read those books, at least some of those books. A few new books have also arrived -- the first of the Booker longlist -- a couple of which are available through my local library system, but most of which I must buy. I've started The Water Cure, but I am not far into it yet and cannot judge. The writing is poetic and lyrical, but the book also seems somewhat hallucinogenic, with a distinctly disturbing undercurrent despite its lyricism. I am drawn in and enjoying it, but so far have trouble connecting what I am reading to the blurbs on the back of the book.

Unpacking. Walking. This is farmer's market Saturday and I love wandering around, the joy of the experience. I've been cooking and have actually cooked, using up last week's haul. Some time with family. A swim. Perhaps I will get pictures up on the walls. Perhaps a stroll along one of the nearby nature trails. It seems like a weekend full of promise, and I hope your weekend plans and hopes are promising indeed.

08/04/2018

Time for a book update. I had been thinking that all I wrote about was books, but it isn't quite true. I had been thinking that all I thought about was books, which may have been slightly more correct, but mostly I thought about books I want to read (Booker longlist) and moving books. When it came to actual reading, July was very light.

Three books. Three very different books, but I enjoyed every one of them.

I've discovered something else as well. Remember how, in the last post, I stated I would surely discover something that should have been brought to the apartment but got stored instead? Well I stored all my journals, including my reading journal, up to the most current (new) one, and most of my notes, the passages I copied out, are in storage. I shall have to rely on memory.

Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.. I loved Exit West, and thought it would be good to read some of Hamid's earlier work. When I saw this at McKay's books, I snapped it up. Obviously the same author, writing about one thing, while pretending to write about another. The book is very witty, at times sarcastic, and very wise, and I can see how it could be off-putting to some. It is written under the pretext of being a self-help book, but it never quite achieves that goal, nor is it meant to, it is a parody of a self-help book. There are no proper nouns in the book, and two parallel narratives. The protagonist, "you" is both the narrator, who rises from poverty to great wealth, and the reader. The other main character, the "Pretty Girl" runs a parallel but different course. The book appears to be about how to achieve great success, but it is actually about the way achieving success and the path to that achievement corrupts us, and what is lost in the end. Although the books take place in Asia, in a world that appears quite corrupt, and we in more developed western countries may think it does not apply to us, Hamid's lessons are universal in that the pursuit of power corrupts, and money is also power, but what the heart really wants is to love and be loved. In the end it is a love story, a love story in a time of seismic social change, and this reader found herself in tears.

Deborah Levy: Hot Milk. Deborah Levy's Hot Milk was short-listed for the Booker a couple of years ago but I just now got to it. I enjoyed the novel, but I think there is a lot I didn't get, a lot going on beneath the surface. I can see how it is the kind of novel that people who dislike literary novels would despise. Half-Greek British girl goes to Spain with her disabled, controlling, hypochondriac confabulist of a mother. The prose is vivid, and sometimes hallucinatory. It does not tell the story directly. But it is still a great novel, about coming of age, about what we gain, but also what we lose, when we unloose chains. Through beautiful and often intensely metaphoric prose riddled with parallels to Greek Tragedy the author throws in Brexit, economic disaster, a warm Spanish paradise that is a horror of toxic waste, sexual freedom, dependence and independence. A lot is made of the themes of those who serve only themselves, vs those who serve others, male and female, and the dangers and traps in both extremes. I found the novel to be at times cryptically elusive and yet easy reading and entertaining, often even quite funny. I could read it again. Perhaps I should read it again. But I probably won't.

Caitlin Macy: Mrs. If I picked up this novel in a bookstore I would probably think of it as one of those quick reads about the imperious and overly arrogant one-percenters who are due for a fall, and I am certain there are readers who chose this book for that reason. They would be disappointed, because there is very little action and no really shocking upset. I read it slowly and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the writing rewards attention, as the author is deft at subtle detail, the kind of thing you would miss if you were skimming through quickly. The beauty of the book would be lost. Yes it is about the one-percenters, parents of children in an exclusive pre-school in Manhattan, and yes there is some cultural upheaval. But the book is more than that. It is a satire, but a satire with an undercurrent of humanity. The story is almost an illusion. What is important here is the characters, and the stories they tell themselves, both the primary characters, and those in the backdrop, deployed here as a kind of chorus. Actually, although the story occurs in a specific socio-economic setting, the characters, and aspects of their mores and their behaviors, their assumptions about each other, can be found in any place, in any group. Perhaps I have a soft spot for the book because I have known too many women like these women, but I suspect we all have, if we allow ourselves to look beyond the superficialities. The settings may be different, the level of privilege, but we are not so different. Macy is a deft observer of humanity, and she tells the story through the voices of her characters, interleaving their stories and their perspectives. Each character is portrayed tenderly, with understanding, and yet also witheringly. Each character, in telling the story, reveals themselves inadvertently, showing that weakness or darkness that is meant to remain hidden, often even from themselves, with a subtle turn of phrase. I found this to be great satire because it slips in so quietly, catches one by surprise, if one is paying attention, and therefore hits directly like a needle to the heart. It was an enjoyable read, with some really great lines and a few truths.

I don't know what August will bring, reading-wise. I don't have any of the Booker novels yet, so I can't make predictions about what I will or will not read. I will however, look back, and come up with a list of the books I read in June. Leave no rock unturned, after all.

07/25/2018

This little African stool was George's before I knew him. I didn't think of stacking books on top of it, but it was a good idea. The content, and the location, have evolved. Last summer and fall the stool was stacked with the nominees for the 2017 Booker Prize, and they were removed as they were read. Paul Auster's 4321 is the only remaining book on the short list I have not gotten to, although there are actually three additional books from the 2017 longlist that I still haven't read, and still intend to read. I hope to do better this year.

Currently the stack contains the Booker winners from the past 5 years, plus the aforementioned 4321. I have not read them all, although I hope to do so. I also hope to read this year's longlist. I accept that although I may well read all these books, I may not do so in a timely fashion. Still, it costs me no more to hope.

The 2018 longlist was announced yesterday. The collage shown above was taken from The Telegraph, here. Of these books, I have already read Warlight, and I have a copy of the Overstory on my stack, just waiting for a little post-move defragmentation and a hoped for increase in my ability to concentrate. I've been of mixed minds about The Mars Room, but accept that I will indeed read it. In fact there are a couple of novels I would probably never have chosen to read were they not on the list, and so I shall be thankful in advance for expanded horizons.

But there are very few Booker-nominated books I have felt were a waste of time, and some have completely entranced or changed my way of thinking. The Sellout was one of those books and, in fact, it was a difficult read. Initially I was simply shocked and dismayed, but the novel won me over, and showed me a new way of looking at a culture, at people's hearts, and through the novel, at myself and my own assumptions.

But of course that is what fiction does. it doesn't have to be literary fiction. Three of my favorite books last year were on the short list for the Man Booker, and I probably would not have read two of them were it not for that list. My other favorite books were by Louise Penny; I don't consider them inferior, just different. In fact books chosen for the Booker Prize may not be better, just different. There is room for all kinds of books in the world, just as there are all kinds of readers. C.S. Lewis said something along the lines of: "there are no bad books, only poor readers", and I tend to think there is a lot of wisdom in that statement. That line has been running around in my head a lot this year, as has Abraham Rothberg's statement that "fiction is a lie that tells the truth". Lies are lies, except when they are not. The truth is the truth, except when it is not. I better not let my poor brain spin in circles.

Better, I think, to start looking for books. Last year, most books on the list were not available at my local library. I don't suppose this year will be much different.

07/11/2018

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually toward you. "A memoir is the last inheritance" you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believe something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight, page 135.

It is rather odd to be writing a post about a book I read over a month ago, books actually, as more than one book is haunting my memory cache. But there are advantages to distance as well, one being the inability to provide a proper review of the book, as my memory is just not up to the task. Instead what you will get is a mishmash of remembered ideas and themes, almost like fragments of conversations that have haunted my thoughts.

It should not surprise you that I loved Warlight. I love Ondaatje's poetic prose, and the way his books always seem somewhat shrouded and circular, revealing themselves slowly, as though through a mist or a fog. In that sense this novel is typical: the prose is lyrical, the characterizations complex, but like the plot, everything is non-linear and somewhat difficult to suss out. Nothing is easily revealed. But then nothing is easily revealed in life either. We make snap judgements, seek easy answers, but they often lead us down false paths. So too Ondaatje's characters.

Actually Warlight, the title itself, is a foreshadowing and a metaphor for much of what is explored in the novel itself. The term of course refers to the dimmed light from World War II, but it also refers to memory and the way we are shaped by our experiences, but not just our experiences alone, but by the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences. "What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here." (p. 274). Nathanial has defined himself as an abandoned child. That it happens to be true, or at least technically partially true, is not the point; the point is how the experience shapes his life, how what he choses to remember, and what he choses to forget, shape the person he becomes.

Warlight is a fascinating novel, and I'm sure I've missed the gist of most of it here, but my in my thoughts certain themes swirl together with other themes and other books. Perhaps these thoughts are complicated because I interrupted Warlight in the middle to read another book, a book that happened to land in my pile from the library at precisely that moment. The second book was The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. And here I am, writing about two books that are nothing alike in the same paragraph.

Or are they really all that different after all? Certainly The Immortalists is not as poetic as Warlight. But The Immortalists may appeal to those who want a little more story, a little more action, a little less navel grazing. And yet the stories are related. Both begin in the childhood of their protagonists; in both, a childhood incident becomes a focal point in defining the person each will become. Nathaniel is a man afraid of making connections. In The Immortalists, the bored quest of a summer afternoon seemingly alters the course of lifetimes. Or does it? That is one of the questions asked by this fascinating novel. Four children visit a fortune teller; four children are told the day of their death. Three of them die on their assigned date. But was the date a chain or a key? The children are shaped by their family, by their culture, by so many things, and the fortune-teller is just the pivot point.

Benjamin uses the story as a starting point in an exploration of time, place, culture, families and relationships. And it is a tale simultaneously evocative, endearing, maddening. We move from The Lower East Side of New York in the 70's to San Francisco in the 1980s, to the Hudson Valley and back to California. The youngest, Simon, is the first to die. But was the proffered date a gift or a curse? Even at a tender age he feels different from his family, a child torn between self and environment. Did the fortune-teller see the future, or is she simply intuitive, seeing something of the essential nature of each child and offering them a tool? There are no easy answers here, and the children, as well as their mother, eventually must question their own motives, their strengths and failings, as well as the burdens of love, hope, guilt. Ondaatje and Benjamin are examining similar questions in very different ways, with different, and yet related, revelations to be mined.

All this brings me to yet another novel, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. Ng's novel is the easiest read of the novels discussed here, but it is not necessarily lightweight and I think there are depths under its glassy surface. I think it perfectly captured its milieu and its intention. I would even say that the broad characterizations, stereotypes almost, actually served the point rather well here. Ng is weighing the promise of success, the promise of the "ideal" life, of the bubble we have created around aspirational class American life, and finding it somewhat wanting. It is a life of surfaces. This novel is more direct in placing blame, in revealing flaws in the surface.

One of the deepest fault lines in Little Fires Everywhere revolved around Mrs, Richardson (Elena) and her youngest daughter, Izzy. I found the portrayal of this relationship both shocking and also sensitive precisely because of its obliqueness. And it is this relationship exactly that ties this novel to the other two in this post. Nathanial has self-identified as abandoned. The children in the Immortalist both absorb and strike out against the expectations of their parents, parents who are trying to rise above their own stations in the world, with sometimes tragic results. All three novels present the needs of children at odds with their parent's own needs and expectations. And Izzy? Poor Izzy. I felt sorry for Izzy from the very beginning. She is the identified patient of the story, and we initially meet her in absentia, through the eyes of her family and her assigned role in that family. But then, as the novel progresses we see glimpses of the true Izzy, and Ng is clever here, slowly revealing that the stereotypical "bad child" is rarely what she is made out to be. Izzy is the child that never fit her mother's mold, and whom the mother has singled out from the beginning; confrontation becomes her only option.

I have known mothers like Elena Robinson. I know their children. I think Ng successfully tried to portray something that is more common than we would like to believe in a sympathetic way. She did not make Izzy the evil child. She did not even make Elena the evil mom, although it is evident that most of Elena's identity as the warm, loving, caring, generous mom is mostly about her perception of her role than it is about any actual benefit to her children. We see Izzy gaining confidence. We see Elena unraveling. Izzy may have been the match that lit the fires, but the fires were built by Elena. The match did not strike itself. For one brief moment, Mia, the creative mom, and the dangerous interloper, incites the other children to work with Izzy, to act with her rather than against her. We can only hope it is enough. Ng gives subtle hints of the future, but no easy answers here.

Do these books all run together in my mind because they were read in close proximity to each other? Or do they feed some natural bent in my own imagination? It is probably a combination of both, proximity and my own interpretations of experience. But words, like children in a small way, take on lives of their own, form their own relationships with readers. I am interested in how reading changes us, whether or not it affects our own understandings and relationships.

Have you read any of these novels? If so, what thoughts have stuck with you? They do not need to mirror mine. They should not mirror mine. I see only what is reflected in my own mirror, but without other angles, other views from other mirrors, there is no insight, no enlightenment, no growth.

05/31/2018

I did read two nonfiction books. One was wonderful, and will be saved to be read again and again, the other, for me at least, is best forgotten. The good book? That would be The Dream of God by Verna Dozier. The subject is theological, basically working from Dozier's premise that institutional Christianity has emphasized worshiping Jesus rather than following Jesus. It is a short book, and it is not difficult reading in the sense that is not particularly academic, but it is difficult because it is thought-provoking, because the author addresses difficult questions, questions that are worth exploring, not just in terms of institutional life but in terms of individual life and action. She explores the problems we have as humans, as creatures who live communally and need structure, but also as creatures with souls, as people of faith, and I personally don't care what your faith is. She asks us what it means to be a person of faith, what it means to be a person of belief and to live that belief, to live the truth of one's soul, as opposed to building a structure and letting the structure define the life rather than aide it.

But I am still feeling a little tired and overwhelmed and I can't really begin to discuss Verna Dozier with any confidence. I can say, however, that I did not like David Yaffe's Reckless Daughter. Actually the book was fine. Yaffe is a good writer, and I think he sees himself as a Mitchell fan-boy, but the book comes across inconsistently, as if the author is struggling with his own lilac-hued view of his subject. I can admit that I read the book because I like Joni Mitchell's music, and that I believe she probably is brilliant. I can admit that I have no problem with the idea that people who are brilliant or geniuses are often very imperfect in other ways, and may in fact even be unlikeable. None of us is perfect after all. And, although it may not be true, I am willing to grant leeway to people of great brilliance, as if the excessive light takes its toll in other ways, leaving great failings. That does not, to me at least, make the genius of the work less amazing, merely human. Having said all that, I still struggled with this book. It wasn't the tell-all information about Joni Mitchell, the fact that she comes across as incredibly self-absorbed, arrogant, fragile, self-righteous and incredibly twee, that bothered me. I would expect that all that informed her genius, her ability to put emotion into songs. What bothered me was that somehow I didn't feel drawn into understanding the subject any better as a human, I merely grew increasingly annoyed with the author and the book itself. Just me, but it was not my book.

Fiction:

Ali Smith, Winter. A favorite. In case you missed it, I wrote about it here.

Ali Smith, Autumn. Reread after reading Winter. Mentioned in the link above, and here as well, although I didn't write much about this book the first time around.

Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness and Dear Life. I am not, by nature, really a short-story reader. I tend to prefer to lose myself in long novels. Short-stories always seem exactly that, too short. These stories were brilliant however, and the author captures some essential aspect of each character in each story. Together they reveal a lot about human nature, and I am glad I read them. I remain unconverted to the form.

Salman Rushdie, Grimus. Rushdie's first novel is rather fantastical, a jumble of science fiction, folk-tales, and fantasy, and I can see that it would not appeal to everyone. It is ambitious. Based on a Sufi poem, the novel explores what it means to be human and how we seek to find or reconcile our desires with our search for identity and meaning in life. I think at times the story gets overwhelmed. Rushdie manages his stories more smoothly in later novels, but I loved Grimus anyway, not perhaps despite its flaws, but because of its flaws. Perhaps because it is so abstract in a way, metaphorical and difficult, I am drawn into the story as if into its own space, another world, but one that reflects, although only partially, our own struggles in this one.

Xhenet Aliu, Brass. Really this was an incredibly good novel. It is not the kind of thing I am normally drawn to, and yet I am very happy I read it. Aiiu tells the story of two women, mother and daughter, in alternating voices, and she pulls this off beautifully. Elsie's story is told in first person. Her daughter's story is told in second person, a voice I often find incredibly difficult to be drawn into, but it fits here. Luljeta, is still young, is struggling with her own life, with the tremendous chip she carries on her shoulder, and the second person voice fits with her personality and personal struggles. Elsie and Luljeta are very different people as young girls and the voices fit them and reveal them each in their own way. This is one of the strengths of the book, and the way that Aliu can tell a story that draws the reader into those small, sometimes dark places, that haunt people, even good people, or perhaps especially good people, and threaten to pull them down. But the voices are also interesting, as each story takes place at a certain turning point in the teenage life of each character. In that sense, one might think that Luljeta's voice, being the more recent, would be the first-person voice, and Elsie, looking back on her life, would be telling the story in second person. But that is not what Aliu is doing here, and by telling Elsie's story in the present-tense voice of her youth, she effectively sets a stage, and renders the story with a depth and poignancy that echoes through both lives. Highly recommended.

05/15/2018

I am going to be a bit too exuberant here. I read Ali Smith's novel Winter last week and I was completely blown away. I think it is brilliant. It is also thoughtful and funny and blisteringly compassionate, if blistering and compassion can be used together in a way that makes sense, but somehow, in terms of this novel, it does.

Admittedly it took me a bit to get settled in the novel, and I had my doubts over the first 50 pages or so, but then I was lured in. In the end, I I think Winter is even more compelling than Autumn, although it isn't nearly as immediately accessible. This is a novel to savor slowly, and as I read, I also saw that the discomfort one feels, especially at the beginning, is intentional. After that I began to see what Smith was doing, and I feel deeply for the book, for its beautiful prose, for Smith's amazing way of looking at things and telling a story, for the layers of humanity and metaphor and meaning, as well as the way the author can subtly and magnificently turn everything on its head and make it seem like the most natural thing in the world.

Initially it seemed to me that Winter was more deeply imbued in its seasonal theme than Autumn was but that was only on my first reading. I went back and read Autumn again, and think it fits its title perfectly, and Winter, well winter is a more difficult time for most of us. Smith actively uses winter metaphors and ideas here, more directly than in Autumn, but Autumn is no less autumnal than Winter is, in many ways, an exploration of winter. The novel is rooted in its time, and yet it is not. The author understands the way the threads of relationships, of past, present and future all intertwine and are simultaneously related and separate.

I would say that Autumn and Winter are kindred, and I am using Smiths' phrasing here. The novels are related, but not directly so. There is overlap. Two characters in Autumn reappear in Winter, although a major character in winter was but a whisk of memory in Autumn, and a major character from Autumn plays a minor role in this novel. You do not have to have read one to enjoy or understand the other. The novel deals with relationships, as did Autumn, but not just the relationship of the characters to each other, but to themselves, and it is also a skillful commentary and allegory about changing climates, in our understandings of ourselves, our relationships, in our social and sociopolitical worlds, science, art, socialization and self-absorption.

Smith explores the ways in which we are constantly evolving as the world around us also evolves, through storms and deep freezes, and eventual springs. The winter metaphor and allegory is explored, no it is almost embodied in its many forms in the text, but like winter itself, the story is not without hope. And this is where I think the novel really is brilliant. Smith uses winter as a way of exploring the human condition. This novel, its subject and its title, gives the author a way to frame and explore relationships and who we are, forming a metaphor that bridges our experiences, bringing new perspective. I used the idea earlier that the novels are kindred, picking up from this line in the novel, referring to Kepler, but as part of a deeper tale:

Kindred means family, what I'm saying is that the thought that truth and time are sort of related, family to each other.

And yet I think this also relates to what Smith is doing here, and to the reason that I am looking forward to the next novels in this series, more so now than I was even after reading Autumn. In fact I bought this book immediately upon its release, and then put off reading it after a couple of people said it was a disappointment, as if that should really matter to my ability to form my own opinion. Now however, after reading the novel, I would say that even this tendency to trust the consensus over one's own opinion is also melded into the themes of these novels. Winter is complex and musical in its structure, not a simple little ditty, but a symphony. My words cannot do it justice. I think this is a novel that will bear up to reading and rereading, which is good, because I think I will be revisiting it with each new addition to the series. Going back to that symphonic metaphor, I feel as if each of these novels is the movement in a symphony. Each stands alone, and yet I cannot think of one without referring, either backward or forward to the other. Smith is writing stand-alone novels, but which are also intimately a part of something greater, something that is revealed only in the relationship between the parts, just as the phases of our lives and our relationships seem to stand apart but are not, are all woven into a complex fabric which we, for the most part, never unravel.

05/01/2018

I am basically feeling well, but still congested, and perhaps then a little unfocused. Perhaps my reading was a little unfocused as well. Anyway, all I'm up for is a simple accounting. If I blogged about a book there will be a link, and I probably will have little to say. My goal continues to write about books as they affect my thoughts, if they affect my thoughts, and just give a monthly accounting. Obviously I have a long way to go before I perfect that idea.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Interesting and entertainingly written. I'm sure I learned something; I also thought about the book occasionally while reading other books this month although they had nothing, directly, to do with astrophysics. But that's the thing about learning, ideas crop up in interesting places, new insights arrive.

The Cinderella Murder, Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke. Another in a series I started last month and now have finished. Entertaining fluff.

The Leavers, Lisa Ko. This was an interesting and somewhat difficult novel. For me the difficulty was in the way the story felt disconnected and choppy here and there, like I never quite fully connected with the protagonist or any of the main characters, It was really only as I came close to the end of the book that I fully understand that that the author was intentionally playing with a sense of disjointedness, trying to help the reader actually experience the way the various experiences in this young man's life contributed to this sense he had of not belonging. The author does pull this together in the end. I still feel a bit unsettled about the book, perhaps that too is the point.

The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt. Interesting as a literary detective story, which is, in fact, the majority of the book.. Not quite so interesting in its interpretation of Medieval thought. Greenblatt's argument about the role Lucretius played in the changes in ways of thought that lead to the renaissance and modernity are actually pretty nuanced, and his writing is smoothly entertaining and at times gripping. And this is the problem in that Greenblatt glosses over many aspects of Medieval philosophy and culture if it does not suit his story, leading to a rather one-sided and not particularly accurate view of the medieval period, that appears misinformed or misguided. But this may be only distortion due to simplification and the consequences of an easy read. On looking back, the nuance gets lost sometimes in the story, but if the story alone brings one to consider history and philosophy in a new light, it cannot be considered a bad thing. Recommended.

The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck. I really wanted to love this book. It came highly recommended by friends, and I like the premise: a group of German women coming together, dealing with the aftermath of the war. It just didn't seem to live up to its potential for me. It wasn't that I disliked the characters, although they were not necessarily likable, more that they just seemed like puppets to me, each with a designated role to play, and little real human development to help us understand the people behind the stereotypes..

I've Got You Under My Skin, Mary Higgins Clark. Apparently I'm not generally a Mary Higgins Clark fan, although the book was enjoyable enough.

The Christian Moral Life, Timothy Sedgwick. (not in above photo, oops). EFM book. This was my second reading and I still find it profoundly thought provoking. Worth reading.

The Triumph of Christianity, Bart Ehrman. Not theology but a historians attempt to show how a movement got started. Ties together a lot of research in an easy-to-read way, and corrects some popular misconceptions.

04/28/2018

There are mornings when I want to move, to take a brisk walk, but Tikka wants to stop and smell the leaves, and the bushes, and everything else in her path. It pays to slow down. As a a reward for patience, I was treated to this lovely ephemeral blossom, a reminder that beauty, and what is most important and essential about life is often close at hand.

Which brings me back to where I am supposed to be this on this lovely Saturday, writing about Ian McEwan's 2016 novel Nutshell. I mentioned that I had started the book earlier in the week, here, and I stand by what I wrote. It is a hilariously funny and enjoyable read. But there is also a lot more to the novel than mere entertainment, or even its witty send-up of contemporary Western civilization.

The prose is beautiful and elegant and often cold, more sarcastic and often bitter than warm and cuddly, which can be quite disconcerting from a narrator who is in fact not yet a person, a fetus 2 weeks shy of his supposed "due date". In fact that is one aspect of the book that is brilliant while it makes the reader at times quite uncomfortable. This is no Boss Baby or Look Who's Talking; there are laughs but McEwan is far to sophisticated to sink to common one liners. And yes, if you'e read any reviews, the story pretends to be a modern retelling of Hamlet, with our narrator's mother, Trudy, sleeping with her husband's brother, Claude. And certainly a fetus, flooded with emotions and wine and all too close proximity to too much sex is a completely impotent Hamlet. In fact, all the wine and sex, and the narrator's observations of the flood of feelings brought on by both, can also make the reader, this reader anyway, flinch a little bit.

And yet, there is so much more. One holds on, wondering if this hormone-driven emotional wreck of a woman and her stupidly arrogant lover will actually pull it off. There is no mystery about the crime; we are in on it from the beginning. And yet we are kept guessing, just as our young narrator is kept guessing, until we reach the end, the truly perfectly timed end. But I mentioned that there is more to this novel than thinking fetuses, witty commentary, and fun romps through the baser sides of human emotions, and there is. In this, in some ways the young unnamed hero is the our perfect modern everyman, because, as increasingly becomes apparent, we are all trapped in the same kind of bubble, incapable of action, incapable actually of even knowing what is real and what is just intellectual folderol. The narrator is constrained, but we are also constrained. He is flooded with maternal hormones and too much wine, not knowing what is real and what is not. But we are not much different. We spend our lives bombarded by information, by media stories and appeals, our sense and our emotions manipulated daily by media to the point that our judgements and our sense of well-being can be shaped by ideas and things that may be terrible or wonderful, but which are really just abstractions to us. They affect our sense of the world, but are not really a part of the world we inhabit each and every day, our own small slice of it.

As is natural, our narrator finally finds the world, his own small patch of the world, and finds that there is no comparison really between the reality of the present and the abstraction, between the world in which we spend our lives, which we can choose to own and possess and allow its beauty to possess us, or the abstraction, which can hold us, impotent. In the end, even in the face of of disruption, hope lies waiting, quietly, in the most unexpected places.

A slithering moment of waxy, creaking emergence, and here I am, set naked on the kingdom. Like stout Cortez (I remember a poem my father once recited), I'm amazed. I'm looking down, with what wonder and surmise, at the napped surface of a blue bath towel. Blue. I've always known, verbally at least, I've always been able to infer what is blue -- sea, sky, lapis lazuli, gentians -- mere abstractions. Now I have it at last, I own it, and it possesses me. More gorgeous than I dared believe. That is just a beginning, at the indigo end of the spectrum.

04/24/2018

I came home from my trip to Nebraska with a cold or sinuses gone horribly wrong, although it probably started with the former and ended with the latter. My own tendency to overdo has probably contributed to my suffering. I felt better Friday afternoon and went out to a fabulous concert. I then compounded the excess by going to the Winter farmer's market on Saturday, well I did need eggs, only to find I had overdone it, and my exhausted, achy, congested body sent me back to bed for another 36 hours.

Lesson learned. It has been raining. It will be raining. I shall take this as a reminder .

In the end I was grateful that I had some pretty mindless reading with me for the trip, although I often just opted for sleep on the flight home. On the flights to Omaha I read Kristin Hannah's novel The Things We Do For Love, which was warm and touching, with characters that drew one in, a nice easy read to distract one from the petty annoyances of travel. On the flights home I started the prequel to the Under Suspicion series by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke. Actually I originally started reading Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity, which had just come up as an e-reader download from the local library. I've been a little overloaded on library books lately and I wanted to be sure to finish this one in time, but I quickly figured out that I just wasn't up to it. It is an easy enough read, straightforward and friendly but artless, and my head was pounding enough that I needed to be entranced with the prose, or lulled into a mindless story. What I had initially began as a catch in my through in a mildewy room of antiques, turning into something much more like a bad cold. I ended up simply buying cold medicine to suppress my cough and bouts of sneezing, then sleeping through most of the flights. When I wasn't sleeping, rather than trying to read through my blurry eyes, I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix series Lost In Space.

I spent the next 36 hours or so in bed, intermittently reading the Mary Higgins Clark (solo) novel I've Got You Under My Skin, and continuing to work my way through Lost In Space. The Clark was entertaining, she is a good story-teller, if predictable, but in the end I think the later novels are more tightly executed. But then I've never been a Mary Higgins Clark fan. Lost In Space, was also fun. I didn't expect much from it. I loved the original series when I was a child, but even then I knew it was pretty silly. The new version takes itself a little more seriously, but its still just fun entertainment. Again, it passed the time and I have no regrets. Moises and Tikka were certainly happy for extra mommy snuggle time.

I did finish the Ehrman yesterday; which proved to be a good, friendly, non-academic repackaging of the first few hundred years of Christian history. The growth of a small sect into a religion that shaped Western Culture is endlessly fascinating, and Ehrman does a good job of cutting through a lot of accumulated mists of time and misinformation in an accessible way.

I hope to dig into the new Elizabeth George sometime this week, but it is a big book, and I have been wimpish. I started reading Winter by Ali Smith -- I love the opening chapter, but I want to rustle up my copy of Autumn, and have it waiting in the wings, so that is on temporary pause. I'm currently reading Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which I am finding wittily entertaining. McEwan manages to indulge in beautiful prose indulging his world-weary, prickly, astute social and psychological observations (out of the mouths of babes) coming from the thoughts of a protagonist whose very articulate precociousness also reveals and explores his profound vulnerability and the haunting fragility of life. Sounds serious; it isn't. This is a fun book.

04/10/2018

It's not all been light and frothy novels and frivolous reading around here, although that was indeed exactly what I needed for a time. In fact, my favorite novel caught me by surprise. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant had been sitting on my pile for a while, and I believe I had picked it up more than once, but somehow it never clicked. I can see how that can happen as it is not what I might have expected from Ishiguro, and yet the more I read the more I was drawn in. The author is a fabulous storyteller, and on that front this novel does not disappoint, or perhaps it does, if you are looking for a simple tale with easy answers, or if you have been lured into this novel unwittingly by its use of Authurian legend and magic. But although the author uses these devices, this is neither a historical novel or a traditional fantasy, but a multi-layered allegory, ostensibly about memory, but read on multiple levels it is about love, life, memory, war, the need to remember, the need to forget, and how ego sometimes masquerades as altruism and vice versa. In short it is about life, and about what is truly important, truly human. And yet what struck me the most was perhaps how truly enjoyable it was to read this novel. I was, and continue to be, enchanted, although I wish perhaps that I had written more about the book when I was actually reading it.

I have intended to write more often about my readings and the word-inspired musings that cross my brain, but I suppose that I should be content that I write anything at all at the moment as I seem to be perfectly content just puttering along. But at least there is the monthly post, with occasional updates appearing randomly.

My second favorite book read in March was another not-so-new book, W.S. Merwin's The Lice, a book of poems, and difficult poems at that. Although it was not at all intentional, they were, in an odd sort of way a suitable companion to the Ishiguro. The Lice was written during the Vietnam era, and the poems are filled with metaphor and allegory, and often filled with shocking and brutal images, mundane activities that take a turn, leaving this reader feeling like she had been turned inside out and upside down. Ishiguro does the same thing, but in a much more subtle and pleasing way. Of course we need both: to be shocked and brought up short on some occasions, and at others to be lead innocently down a flower-strewn path before we encounter the precipice. Merwin reminded me of the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, mostly because Merwin and Ezekiel are doing much the same thing, of course in different times and for different audiences. Or perhaps it was just that my EFM group was reading Ezekiel as I was in the middle of the Merwin. Either way, I might wish I had written, but I didn't, and the poems and stories and words still haunt me. I wonder sometimes if we have grown more stupid even as we've grown more technologically advanced. I don't believe the ancients believed their stories were factual for a moment, only that they understood that metaphor and allegory pointed to truth in a way that experience and fact never could.

But what else did I read?

I mentioned All Dressed in White, just the other day, here. I also read The Sleeping Beauty Killer and Every Breath You Take from the same series. I enjoyed the stories. I like the main character. I always figure out who the killer is long before the end of the book, but not necessarily the reason or the circumstances. Similarly, although not a mystery, Ginger's Reckoning, was fast and entertaining, and captured the whole greed/scandal/look-the-other-way thing going on in the 1980s, but I wish it had more depth and fewer easy answers.

Also high on the easy answer scale was The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Hannah is a fabulous story-teller, and the book was a great read. The kudos about this book are well-deserved in that it is a great indulge-yourself-with-a-cup-of-tea-and-enter-another-world type of book. Set in France during World War II, it reminded me of several other historical novels exploring related settings and questions that have cropped up in recent years, without being quite as treacly, and, surprisingly, that proved to be a disappointment. My impression was that Hannah's skill as a writer has grown since I last read one of her novels, quite some time ago, enough to make me wish this book was more than it actually was. I'm on the waiting list for her new novel, way down on the waiting list, so that will be a while, and I've picked up one of her early novels at the local second-hand book store to take on an upcoming trip, just to resolve memories and impressions; besides, it is always good to have a throw-away read on a plane.

L'appart is David Lebovitz's tale of finding and renovating his Paris apartment. Charming and disarming the book was occasionally frustrating to this reader simply because I marveled at his naïveté, at least where his contractor was concerned. But that is actually one of the strengths of this book: I could never be the baker that Lebovitz is, and we have different skills. One of the things I have learned is that it is hard for us to accept that people we admire for one set of skills may appear ill-prepared, or even incompetent in other areas. But this is one of the unpleasant truths of the human condition. We all excel at something and yet are incompetent in other arenas, we just don't want to be reminded of our own failings. Writing a light-hearted book about difficult times is harder than it sounds, and incredibly brave. Kudos.

The Gluten-Free Revolution came up because I am once again going through cookbooks and books about food, thinking about what will have to be packed up and stored during remodeling and what is worth hanging onto for the duration. No answer to that question yet, but it did lead me to spending a week or so poring over Bouchon Bakery. Lowell includes a recipe from the latter book, but she prints it using measurements rather than weights, and the numbers felt odd. I wanted the weights so I got the book out of the library. I've updated the recipe to include the weights, and I won't buy the book, as I probably could not use most of it, but I spent quite a few happy evenings reading about baking and imagining flavors in my head. Just the reading reminded me of my younger self, the baker, and although I some part of me would love to get involved in baking again, another part of me knows I would lose the battle with my sweet tooth were I to embark on such a path. Everything in Bouchon Bakery, with the exception of the one recipe, would have to be adapted, but I certainly spent hours thinking of a time when I could bake, and was ignorant of celiac disease and ignorant of the dangers gluten and butter posed to my well-being. And then, like all good trips down memory lane, I was happy to close the book, return it to the library, and embrace the future.

Peculiar Ground was beautifully written and I would repeatedly stop and just savor the prose, but neither the story nor the characters fully captured my imagination. Beautiful as it was, prose alone, for this reader at least, was not quite enough. I did appreciate the way the author pulled together the two timelines at the end of the novel. This duel or multiple timeline approach, with the subsequent stitching together is a current trend, and it was managed well here, but still it was not enough for me to care. There was also a theme about gardens and trees, and the arrogance of men and gardeners in the book which struck me perhaps because I had just finished The Hidden Life of Trees.

I struggled a bit more with The Unforgotten. This first novel was actually quite well done, even though I struggled at times. I figured out who the real killer was early on, and the murder mystery was not the source of the suspense in the novel, but I felt that at times the tension fell flat, and didn't really connect or build up to the final reveal. But I am nitpicking here, and the characters and the story have stayed with me, far more in fact that anyone in Peculiar Ground. The author had a good handle on how memory, choices, and perceived betrayal and even good intentions can haunt one and shape a life in ways never imagined, and I am even willing to admit that the unsettledness of the story line, and its opaqueness may have been intentional, just as the perceptions and intentions of the main characters were opaque to each other, making the end all the more tragic. It is an ambitious first novel, and I am looking forward to more from this author.

I used to think of myself as continually distracted, but that is far from the truth. The truth is that I find the world to be filled with fascinating things that capture my attention. When I am doing something I love, be it reading a book, listening to music, sewing, knitting, learning something new, or just daydreaming, I am so totally focused that the intrusion of the world comes as something of a shock. There are so many things pulling at my hearstrings, so many things in which to lose myself, so many things tempting away from my one true passion ..... of the moment. I want to explore them all.
Despite these changing passions, there are some constants in my affections: sewing, knitting, style and clothing, music, food. These are the main topics I will consider here, although there will be digressions and explorations as well.